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CALGARY — If Premier Alison Redford’s PCs have any sense of vulnerability after their spring election win, a pair of new numbers should give them a serious jolt.

One was $85; Wednesday’s price for a barrel of oil.

That’s nearly $15 below the PC government’s forecast for the year.

Sustained, it means severely shrunken revenues and a hard slide into another big deficit.

You never know with oil prices, of course, but they’ve been so far below the forecast for so long that by the time the year is out, the Tories may have trouble holding the deficit below $3 billion.

The other jolting number is $3.1 million.

That’s the astonishing total raised by Danielle Smith’s Wildrose party during the spring election campaign.

This political bonanza poured in between March 26 and June 23, the official campaign period for contribution purposes.

Quite literally, party officials were swamped by this gusher of political cash.

The PCs, by sharp contrast, raised only $1.6 million in the same period.

In a perfect allegory of current Alberta politics, the PCs spent the most on their campaign — $4.6 million — and ran a deficit of $3 million.

Wildrose, by contrast, raised $3.1 million but spent a smidgen less than their income, booking a surplus of $29,000.

Wildrosers gleefully say the PCs run the government the way they run their party. They promise to do exactly the same thing someday.

For Redford’s crew, the campaign numbers are even worse than they look.

A big measure of any party’s popularity is the money it raises from small donors.

In that area the PCs did dismally, raising only $64,000 from people who gave $375 or less.

Wildrose pulled just over $1 million from the same category of donors.

It’s obvious that during most of the campaign, many more regular donors were impressed by Wildrose than the PCs.

Even among bigger donors — those giving above $375 — Wildrose drew nearly $500,000 more than the PCs.

All this makes what happened next even more shocking.

The PCs won 61 seats, and Wildrose only 17, in what must be the strangest finish in Alberta political history.

It all collapsed for Wildrose in the last week, as people became alarmed by one candidate’s infamous Lake of Fire for gays, and voters began to doubt whether Smith was ready for office when she refused to dump him.

At the same time, business people were jolted by her challenge to climate change science. Even though many agreed with her, they didn’t want the world to hear it from Alberta’s premier.

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